upon the thing before him; he goes off, and distracts us, and breaks
the impression he had begun to succeed in giving, by bidding us look
now at something else. Some simpler epithets than _shaking_, and some
plainer language than _tarnished gold_ or _aged limbs_, would have
done the work better. We are quite prepared to believe that these
faults and these _disagreeables_ have personally been necessities to
the writer, are awkwardnesses of growth, of which the full stature
may show no trace. He should be assured, however, that though the
rude vigour of the style of his Life-Drama may attract upon the first
reading, yet in any case, it is not the sort of writing which people
recur to with pleasure and fall back upon with satisfaction. It may be
a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole hemisphere,
so to say, of the English language which he has left unvisited. His
diction feels to us as if between Milton and Burns he had not read,
and between Shakspeare and Keats had seldom admired. Certainly there
is but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century;
yet English was really best and most naturally written when there
was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real command of the
language, some familiarity with the prose writers, at any rate, of that
period, is almost essential; and to write out, as a mere daily task,
passages, for example, of Goldsmith, would do a verse-composer of the
nineteenth century as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont
and Fletcher.
TWO LETTERS
OF
PAREPIDEMUS.
(Published in ‘Putnam’s Monthly,’ New York, for July and
August 1853.)
I.
MY DEAR SIR,--I left this country as nearly as possible (next June,
I believe, will complete it) one quarter of a century back, to go to
school. I was sent ‘home,’ as they called it--that is, away from home,
to the land which my parents, and, I presume, yours also, long ago
belonged to--to be educated.
Does one get educated in twenty-five years, I wonder? The wisest of the
seven wise men of Greece describes to us how that he
Each day grew older and learnt something new.
And, since the something new may possibly contradict, and will
assuredly modify, the everything not so new before it, at what age may
one consider oneself entitled, for example, to write letters in print
to the editor of a magazine? At what figure does one attain one’s
real majority and right of speech? How soon may one venture to affirm
anything which everybody else does not already know and believe? And,
in the meantime, is there any good in talking merely to be assented to?
Is it so agreeable an exercise on the part of the reader to express
mentally to himself that assent? If agreeable, is it therefore useful?
‘Were it not better done as others use?’ to follow the plough or the
ledger, to find a Neæra in agriculture, or an Amaryllis in commerce?
‘What boots it, with incessant care, to tend the slighted’ bookmaker’s
trade, ‘and strictly meditate the thankless muse’ of magazines? Will
posterity know anything of our miserably imperfect, impotent fugitive
verses, or contemporaneity be none the worse for them? Are we not most
likely corrupting the pure taste which would otherwise turn with a
natural appetite to Shakspeare and Milton, to Addison and Goldsmith, to
Virgil and Homer? Goethe, I have heard, said not long before his death,
that had he known ere he began writing how many good books there were
in the world before, he would never have written a word.
There is one thing, indeed, I think one might do, could one only
believe that one could. No so certain a way of learning the merit of
a great picture as an attempt to copy it or represent something like
it. And as we, if we look to it and take pains, may by our indifferent
writing learn to appreciate the worth and merit of great writers,
whom before we thought but little of, so it is also possible that our
faithful, though small attempts, may help people to appreciate the
great originals.
Every new age has something new in it--takes up a new position; the
view presented by the writers of an anterior age is not readily
seized, or adopted by those born in a later century. It may, I think,
be one good work attainable to the efforts of the humble, modern
_littérateur_, to elevate and direct to the noblest objects the tastes
and enjoyments of his contemporaries. He holds a position common
with them: he may avail himself of this for their edification. As
the traveller who knows the country will show his less experienced
companion at each new stage, each further remove, under changed
aspects, the high mountain points they are retiring from; will point
out the Mont Blanc whose shadow they stood in at Chamouni, in its
full magnificent outline at Sallanches, and again, far distant, yet
not less rose-tinged, at sunset from Geneva, so the writers (that is,
or should be, the more instructed readers) of each new century may
successively restore each successive generation to connection with the
teachers of the past. Such is a possible function for a writer. Do
twenty-five years educate one, I wonder, for this--twenty-five years of
the universal slovenly habits of writing, speaking, hearing, thinking,
remembering, which pervade our time? ‘Twenty-five years have I spent
in learning,’ said the young man to the old. ‘Return,’ said the sage,
‘and spend another twenty-five in unlearning.’ ‘Each day grow older
and _un_learn something’--is this to be our other reading of Solon’s
maxim? Alas! it would seem there is need of it. We submit ourselves for
instruction to teachers, and they teach us (or is it our awkwardness
that we learn from them?) their faults and mistakes. Each new age and
each new year has its new direction; and we go to the well-informed
of the season before ours, to be put by them in the direction which,
because right for their time, is therefore not quite right for ours.
Upon the water in a boat,
I sit and sketch as there we float;
The scene is fair, the stream is strong,
I sketch it as we float along.
The stream is strong, and as I sit
And view the picture that we quit,
It flows and flows, and bears the boat,
And I sit sketching as we float.
Still as we go, the things I see,
E’en as I see them, cease to be,
The angles shift, and with the boat
The whole perspective seems to float.
Each pointed height, each wavy line,
To new and other forms combine;
Proportions change and colours fade,
And all the landscape is remade.
Depicted--neither far nor near,
And larger there and smaller here,
And partly old, and partly new,
E’en I can hardly think it true.
Yet still I look, and still I sit,
Adjusting, shaping, altering it;
And still the current bears the boat
And me, still sketching as we float.
Did I really read or only dream somewhere that anecdote of an elderly
painter, who, going over one day, with a friend of his youth, who
had known him in his prime and promise, a series of his popular and
most admired pieces, said mournfully, ‘All these poor, unmeaning,
ill-designed, half-executed things, I have made to earn bread and time
to do _that_,’ pointing to a chaotic, unfinished canvas at the end of
the room, ‘and _that_, after all, is as bad as any of them.’ ‘This
also,’ saith the Preacher, ‘is a sore evil that I have seen under the
sun.’
To grow old, therefore, learning and unlearning, is such the
conclusion? Conclusion or no conclusion, such, alas! appears to be our
inevitable lot, the fixed ordinance of the life we live. The cruel
king Tarchetius gave his daughters a web to weave, upon the completion
of which he said they should get married; and what these involuntary
Penelopes did in the daytime, servants by his orders undid at night. A
hopeless and a weary work, indeed, especially for young people desirous
to get married.
Weaving and unweaving, learning and unlearning, learning painfully,
painfully unlearning, under the orders of the cruel king Tarchetius,
behold--are we to say, ‘our life’? ‘Every new lesson,’ saith the
Oriental proverb, ‘is another grey hair; and time will pluck out this
also.’ And what saith the Preacher? ‘I, the Preacher, was King over
Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by
wisdom concerning all things that are done under the heavens; this sore
travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.’
_Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia_,’ said the young, unthinking
Italian to the grave German sitting by him in the diligence, whose name
was Goethe. Is it true?
To spend uncounted years of pain
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near;
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw,--
Is this the object, end, and law
And purpose of our being here?
Nevertheless, to say something, to talk to one’s fellow-creatures, to
relieve oneself by a little exchange of ideas, is there no good, is
there no harm, in that? Prove to the utmost the imperfection of our
views, our thoughts, our conclusions; yet you will not have established
the uselessness of writing.
Most true, indeed, by writing we relieve ourselves, we unlearn; it is
the one best recipe for facilitating that needful process.
Each day write something, and unlearn it so.
Most true, indeed! The observations that we can make nothing of, the
maxims that have ceased to be serviceable to us, our spent theories,
our discarded hypotheses, the wit that has become stale to us, the
wisdom that has grown fusty with us, the imaginations that molest us,
the illhumours that fret us, our follies, fancies, falsities; oh,
happy relief!--away with them to the magazine!
Yes, methinks I see it so, through the long series of ages. The ‘Iliad’
is but the scum of the mind of Homer, and Plato’s dialogues the refuse
of his thought. Who that reads the ‘Odyssey’ perceives not that it is
an act of penitence for the ‘Iliad,’ and feels not that, had the poet
lived, the ‘Odyssey’ also would have had its Palinode? In the divine
eloquence of Plato there are intonations in which I hear him saying to
me, ‘You know I don’t quite _mean_ all this.’
Alas! ’tis true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
is the Great Dramatist’s profoundest feeling about himself, his doings,
his sayings, his writings. Virgil bade his ‘Æneid’ be burnt; and
what we read as his is not his deliberate word, but that of Varius
and Tucca. As Rousseau, it is said, in his old age, smiled sadly at
the fervent disciples of the ‘Social Contract,’ the ‘Émile,’ and the
‘Julie’; so, doubt it not, did greater than Rousseau. So felt Raphael
of his paintings, and Phidias of his sculptures; Michael Angelo, also,
of his Pantheon suspended in the heavens. Dante, from some strange
region of the spiritual spaces, looks down, half scorn, half remorse,
on the worshippers of the Divine Comedy of his human spleen and
bitterness. Cervantes laughs aloud to hear philosophers discriminate
the pure reason in Don Quixote and the understanding in Sancho; and
Montaigne, with open eyes of more than mortal wonder, repeats his
‘_Que sçais-je?_’ at the sight of grave worshippers of his levities.
May it not be true that when I quote from Milton, a shade of severe
vexation darkens his spiritual features, and when I repeat the wisdom
of Ecclesiastes, an ethereal frown contracts the immortal forehead of
the Preacher?
You are feeding, oh you students of Greek and lovers of Latin, you
that add to your German, French, and to your French, Italian and
Spanish, you inquirers afar off into Persian and Sanscrit, you devotees
of Chaucer and votaries of Shakspeare and Milton--you are feeding upon
that, precisely, which was tried by these wise men of old and found
wanting. You stand picking up the dross where those before you have
carried away the gold; you are swallowing as truth what they put away
from them--_expressed_, because it was false or insufficient.
Or is this, peradventure, confined to our own weaker selves, our more
impatient, irretentive, unthoughtful age? For, certainly, my dear
sir, what you and I and the young people read in any modern page is,
in the manner aforestated, ‘the thing that is not.’ Each striking new
novel does but reveal a theory of life and action which its writer is
anxious to be rid of; each enthusiastic address or oration is but that
which its speaker is just beginning to feel disgusted with. Oh! happy
and happy again, and thrice happy relief to the writer; but to the
reader----?
Said the Tree to the Children, ‘How can you go and pick up those dirty
dead leaves I have thrown away?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Will
you grow us any better next year?’ Said the Tree to the Children,
‘What! are you positively going to put into your mouths those horrid
things (fruit, do you call it?) that have fallen from my branches?’
Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Why, they are very nice.’ Said the
Tree then to itself, ‘Suppose I were to restrain myself next spring,
and not grow any leaves, and to suppress, ascetically, all tendencies
to blossom? Should I not then produce something better? By all that is
wise and moral I will try.’ Said the Springtime six months after to the
Tree, ‘My dear Tree, that is out of the question.’ The Children came
again the next fall, and the Tree made no remark.
An illustration, however, is not the same thing as an argument; though
sometimes, indeed, it may be better. It is a game, in any case, for two
to play at. For it is also told of the Phœnix, that, having reached its
term of years it proceeded to Arabia, and built up carefully its pyre
of odoriferous combustibles, and sat down to expect the new birth. But
when the fire began to kindle, and the odoriferous sticks crackled, the
odours indeed were beautiful (ornithologists, however, are uncertain
whether the Phœnix has any sense of smell), the flame meantime was most
undoubtedly painful in the extreme when it got within the feathers
(the Phœnix, there is no question, has the sense of touch). The
Phœnix started up and exclaimed to itself, ‘Oh! surely, surely, I am
young again now!’ ‘Sit still, sit still, poor Phœnix; not till pain
has deprived thee of the very sense of pain, not until thought and
self-consciousness are burnt out and out of thee--not, by many pangs,
yet--is the new creature born in thee!’ with which exhortation the
story concludes.
And with which illustration, upon which side, my dear sir, is the
truth, or the most of the truth? ‘As the leaves are, so are the lives
of men;’ and so also their writings? Shall we yield to the promptings
of nature, and let the eager sap aspire forth in germination, and
the leaflets open out, and display themselves, to fall from us dead
and uncomely in November? Or shall we burn slowly, in silence, that
hereafter something better may be born of us? _Quien sabe?_
Was it the silence or the speech of previous ages that formed the more
perfect writers? Was Perugino necessary to Raphael, or had Raphael
been more himself without him? Some function, indeed, higher than that
of mere self-relief, we must conceive of for the writer. To sum up
the large experience of ages, to lay the finger on yet unobserved, or
undiscovered, phenomena of the inner universe, something we can detect
of these in the spheric architecture of St. Peter’s, in the creative
touches of the ‘Tempest.’
Imperfect, no doubt, both this and that is; short of the better
thing to come--the real thing that is. Yet not impotent, not wholly
unavailing.
In conclusion, will you let me offer you the last ‘modern invocation’
to the poet--shall we say in modern phrase--of the future? ‘Come, poet,
come’--no, I will trouble you only with a few verses at the end:--
In vain I seem to call, and yet
Think not the living years forget:
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer, in the end, might tell;
O’er grovelling generations past
The Doric column rose at last.
A thousand hearts on thousand years
Had wasted labour, hopes, and fears,
Knells, laughters, and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakspeare saw, or Rome,
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead have sown--
The dead, forgotten and unknown.
Let me sign myself, my dear sir (as we are all ‘strangers and
pilgrims,’ so myself in an especial sense),
Your faithful and obliged
PAREPIDEMUS.
II.
MY DEAR SIR,--Do people in general, upon this side of the great water,
read Homer? Virgil, I know, in some parts of the Union, is a lady’s
book; nor is there, I think, any ancient author that better deserves
the honour. But the man’s book, Homer? It is not every boy that learns
Greek; and not all who learn Greek read through the whole forty-eight
books of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ Is Pope much studied? I should
fancy not: and, indeed, though one is glad to hear any one say that he
has, in the past tense, read that ingenious composition, it is not easy
to bid any one, in the future, go and read it. And, if not Pope, whom
can we recommend? Chapman is barbarous, dissonant, obsolete, incorrect.
In Hobbes there are two good lines, well known, but they cannot be
repeated too often--
And like a star upon her bosom, lay
His beautiful and shining golden head.
(They are of Astyanax in the arms of his mother; and how that first
of English prosaists was inspired with them remains a problem to all
generations.) Cowper, who could read, however much enjoined to it? In
short there neither is, nor has been, nor in all probability ever will
be, anything like a translation. And the whole Anglo-Saxon world of
the future will, it is greatly to be feared, go forth upon its way,
clearing forests, building clippers, weaving calicoes, and annexing
Mexicos, accomplishing its natural manifest destiny, and subsiding into
its primitive aboriginal ignorance. Accomplishing our manifest destiny!
to be, that is, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ to the human
race in general; and then, peradventure, when the wood has all been
hewn, and the water drawn, to cease to exist, to be effaced from the
earth we have subdued--
Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thine earthly task hast done,
Homeward gone, and ta’en thy wages.
To cease to exist, to vanish, to give place, in short, to some nobler
kind of men, in whose melodious and flexible form of speech the old
Homer will have a chance of reappearing unimpaired, or possibly some
new Homer singing the wrath of another Achilles and the wanderings of a
wiser Ulysses.
_Fiat voluntas!_ Let us go forward to our manifest destiny with
content, or at least resignation, and bravely fill up the trench, which
our nobler successors may thus be able to pass.
In the meantime, various attempts in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and
elsewhere, have been made in the last few years at rendering Homer
in modern English hexameter verse. We venture to pronounce them
unsuccessful. It is not an easy thing to make readable English
hexameters at all; not an easy thing even in the freedom of original
composition, but a very hard one, indeed, amid the restrictions of
faithful translation. Mr. Longfellow has gained, and has charmed, has
instructed in some degree, and attuned the ears of his countrymen and
countrywomen (in literature we may be allowed to say), upon both sides
of the Atlantic, to the flow and cadence of this hitherto unacceptable
measure. Yet the success of ‘Evangeline’ was owing not more, we think,
to the author’s practised skill in versification than to his judgment
in the choice of his material. Even his powers, we believe, would fail
to obtain a wide popularity for a translation even from a language
so nearly akin to our own as the German. In Greek, where grammar,
inflection, intonation, idiom, habit, character, and genius are all
most alien, the task is very much more hopeless.
Moreover, in another point, it may be right to turn the ‘Louise’ of
Voss and the ‘Herman and Dorothea’ of Goethe into corresponding modern
so-called hexameters. If the verse is clumsy in our rendering, so was
it to begin with in the original. If no high degree of elegance is
attained, no high degree of elegance was there to be lost.
But in Greek there seems really hardly a reason for selecting this in
preference to some readier, more native, and popular form of verse.
Certainly the easy flowing couplets of Chaucer, the melodious blank
verse of Shakspeare, or some improved variety of ballad metre, such as
Mr. Frere used in translating the ‘Cid,’ would be, on the whole, not
less like the original music of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ than that
which we listen to with pleasure in ‘Evangeline,’ and read without
much trouble in the ‘Herman and Dorothea.’ Homer’s rounded line, and
Virgil’s smooth verse, were both of them (after more puzzling about it
than the matter deserves, I have convinced myself) totally unlike those
lengthy, straggling, irregular, uncertain slips of _prose mesurée_
which we find it so hard to measure, so easy to read in half a dozen
ways, without any assurance of the right one, and which, since the days
of Voss, the Gothic nations consider analogous to classic hexameter.
Lend me, if you can spare them for a moment or two my dear sir, your
ears, and tell me, honour bright, is
Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant
the same thing as
Hab’ich den Markt und die Strasse doch nicht so einsam gesehen
Were I to interpolate in a smooth passage of ‘Evangeline’ a verse from
the ‘Georgies’ or the ‘Æneid,’ would they go together?
Is the following a metrical sequence?
Thus, in the ancient time the smooth Virgilian verses
Fell on the listening ear of the Roman princes and people.
Ut belli signum Laurenti Turnus ab arce.
There is one line, one example of the smooth Virgilian verses, which
perhaps Mr. Longfellow would have allowed himself to use, and his
readers consented to accept, as a real hexameter.
Spargens humida mella soporiferumque papaver,
might, perhaps have been no more objected to than
Tous les Bourgeois de Chartres et le carillon de Dunkerque.
Yet even this most exceptionable form, with its special aim at
expressing, by an adaptation of sound to sense, the
Scattering of liquid honeys and soporiferous poppy,
is a model of condensation, brevity, smoothness, and _netteté_,
compared with that sprawling bit of rhythmical prose into which I have
turned it.
But we are going to be learned, my dear sir; so I release your kind
ears, and beg you will no longer trouble either yourself or them--but,
some one, I foresee, of the numerous well-instructed future readers of
this private correspondence will interpose with his or her objection,
and will tell me, You read your Latin verse wrongly, you don’t put the
stress upon the _ictus_--you should pronounce Virgil like Evangeline,
Evangeline is the true hexameter; in Virgil the colloquial accent which
you follow was lost in the accent of verse. The Romans of old read it,
not
Ut bélli signum Laurénti Túrnus ab árce.
but
Ut belli signúm.
O dear! and can you, courteous and well-instructed reader, positively
read your ‘Georgics’ or ‘Æneid’ in that way? Do you, as a habit, scan
as you go along? Do you not feel it _very_ awkward, must not the
Romans also have felt it _rather_ awkward, to pass so continually and
violently from the ordinary to the sing-song accentuation? And if, as I
think you must allow, there was some awkwardness in it, why is it that
Virgil, and the other good versifiers, so constantly prefer that form
of verse in which this awkwardness most appears? Why is
Spárgens húmida mélla, soporíférúmque papáver,
where there is no such difficulty, a rare form, and ‘Ut bélli
sígnum,’ where there is, a common and favourite one? Do you know,
I shall venture to assert, that in the Latin language the system of
accentuation was this, which enjoined the awkwardness you complain
of; the separation, in general, of the colloquial and the metrical
accent, the very opposite of that which we observe, who, unless the two
coincide, think the verse bad. Enough of this, however.
Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past--come back, my dear sir,
we will talk no more prosody--only just allow me to recite to you a
few verses of _metaphrase_, as they used to say, from the ‘Odyssey’;
constructed as nearly as may be upon the ancient principle; quantity,
so far as, in our forward-rushing, consonant-crushing, Anglo-savage
enunciation--long and short can in any kind be detected, quantity
attended to in the first place, and care also bestowed, in the second,
to have the natural accents very frequently laid upon syllables which
the metrical reading depresses.